A much-heralded and widely cited study of 171 countries over nearly a half century purports to show more guns mean more mass shootings, but critics say the report uses bad methodology in a way that rigs the results.
(FOX)- The study by Adam Lankford, a criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama, was published in the journal Violence and Victims in January and has been cited by media outlets — including The New Yorker, The Washington Postand Time magazine. But the study, formally published earlier this year after a draft was released in academic circles, has raised questions about what critics consider dubious methodology.
“The Lankford ‘study’ is nothing more than junk science disguised as research, and never should have been published in a responsible scholarly journal,” Florida State University criminology professor Gary Kleck told FoxNews.com.
The study, titled “Public Mass Shooters and Firearms: A Cross-National Study of 171 Countries,” concluded that “The United States and other nations with high firearm ownership rates may be particularly susceptible to future public mass shootings, even if they are relatively peaceful or mentally healthy according to other national indicators.”
Academic peers who have sought to examine the findings say Lankford refuses to share the data and details he used to support his findings.
Kleck and others say the obvious hazard in claiming to study 46 years’ worth of shootings in most of the world’s nations is that, while data may be easily found for U.S. shootings, compiling information for developing nations could be all but impossible.
“This would rig results in favor of finding a positive association between gun ownership and mass shootings,” Kleck said.
Lankford’s analysis of mass shootings from 171 countries from 1966 to 2012 comes with the caveat “Complete data were available.” In describing his research, Lankford offers only vague hints as to how he identified incidents in poor, non-English-speaking countries going back 50 years.
“I find this claim hard to believe,” Trinity College economics professor Ed Stringham, who has done research using international crime rates, told FoxNews.com.
When asked for his data by FoxNews.com, Lankford declined to provide it. In his study, Lankford says he took NYPD data on mass shootings — which he acknowledges misses international cases — and “supplemented [it] with additional data” internationally. Lankford does not say exactly how he collected that additional international data, just noting that it came from searches of “open source” documents and that “all efforts were made to ensure that the same data collection methodology employed by the NYPD was used.”